A little more than twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest participant for 2026. Establishing the squad from nothing has entailed a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the America, with approximately 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and gets a knowing grin when considering the experience.
“There might be a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any incoming team coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the track. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now reaching over 400 and planned to reach the target of 600 quickly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to produce the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all tackling various components of the program across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they raise it up to their manager, that manager communicates with a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
